Tess Patterns: Mother's Day is a chance to reconnect

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Tess
Patterns
by Tess Wolfe, Reporter;

My Mom has always looked younger than her well-earned age.

She has a sort of sprightly smile and an incandescent wisdom glowing in her eyes when she looks at each person she speaks with; and she really does look at each person she speaks with.

On this Mother's Day, I want to look back at her, returning her steady gaze that says, "I get it. You don't even have to explain."

Both our birthdays are in the spring; hers in March, mine in April. So, we kind of have this common bond in watching the transition from Northeast Ohio gray skies and bare tree branches to sunlit blue and growing green. My Dad calls her "The March Girl" in another tip of the hat to her effervescent youthfulness.

But my Mom and I have each spent years under gray skies, separately and together. Watching the sky for anything other than rain and failing.

How she maintains fervent optimism in life, tempered with square-in-the-eye determination to face facts, I have no idea. But I'm surely grateful she does.

She's lost much in her travels -- family and friends who are dear but gone, turbulent times that have brought unexpected hardship to soul and spirit -- but she never seems less for the losses. The incandescence burns on.

This Mother's Day, not all of us have our mothers near, nor the chance to see in their eyes a lifetime of memory.

Some have traveled distances that put land and water between self and mother; some are separated by disparate feeling; and some are separated by life and death.

If we have the person near enough in geography or heart to interact with today -- the person we think of as our mother, whether by birth or choice -- we have another chance to say what we need to say.

We have a chance to hear what she's really saying to us -- maybe what she's always wanted us to hear.

If we don't have our mothers close enough this Mother's Day to have that interaction, we can still clear our hearts to listen.

E-mail: twolfe@recordpub.com

Phone: 330-686-3916